Up to this point there is little evidence, but much speculation, about the possibility of a pidginized lingua franca, which actually may have been the forerunner of what was to become the Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir and (providing that it wasn’t the same thing), the “Genovese” or “Commercial” Latin used by merchants in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain and Italy […]. Such a trade vernacular would have exhibited a preponderance of Latin, both in vocabulary and structure; some Greek words would have occurred, since the titular head of the Roman Empire was maintained in Byzantium after the fifth and sixth centuries […].
- Hancock (1977), a pag.287-288